QuestionsAre humans good by nature?Human nature is bad: crooked wood must be straightened
Are humans good by nature?Prone to evil

Human nature is bad: crooked wood must be straightened

"Human nature is bad"; the crooked wood and the carpenter's square; Xing e

Xunzi c. 310 BC · c. 235 BCHuman nature is bad: goodness is the fruit of effort, teachers, rites and laws.
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What it claims

Human nature is bad; goodness is acquired, through teachers, rites and laws, as crooked wood is straightened by the carpenter's square.

Why

Left unchecked, inborn inclinations lead to disorder, and goodness is learned, so it does not come from nature.

The same idea through history
Confucius500 BCConfucius says that people are close by nature and that practice sets them apart, without saying whether this core is good or bad. Mencius and Xunzi will say it in opposite ways.Mencius320 BCMencius holds that nature is good. Chapter 23 of Xunzi quotes him and refutes him by name.
Xunzi250 BCXunzi (c. 310-235 BC), a Confucian like Mencius, turns his thesis around: nature is a bent towards gain and desires, goodness comes from effort and ritual.
Han Fei240 BCHis pupil Han Fei keeps from the master the realism about human motives, but draws from it a politics of law, reward and punishment.
In short

"Human nature is bad: crooked wood must be straightened" is an argument by Xunzi (Xunzi, chapter 23 (c. 250 BC), 250 BC) on the question "Are humans good by nature?" (answer: prone to evil). Its claim: Human nature is bad; goodness is acquired, through teachers, rites and laws, as crooked wood is straightened by the carpenter's square. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 6 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Xunzi, chapter 23 (c. 250 BC)
Valid with an implicit premise

Mencius said that people are born good. Xunzi, a century later, answers him point by point in a whole chapter, "Human nature is bad". For him, what we bring at birth is inclinations: the taste for gain, envy, the desires of eyes and ears. Left to themselves, they lead to quarrel and violence. Goodness exists, but it is an artifice, in the strong sense of something made by people: the sages created rites and justice, and each person must learn them, as crooked wood must be straightened by steam and the carpenter's square. Xunzi is a Confucian: he thinks that anyone can become a sage. But he sees this as the fruit of an effort against nature, not the flowering of nature. The P1 to P5 form is our reconstruction of chapter 23.

P1At birth, a person already has love of gain, envy and hatred of others, and the desires of the eyes and ears.
P2If these inclinations are followed without restraint, strife and rapacity arise, courtesy and loyalty die. Without a ruler, rites, laws or punishments, the strong would injure the weak and the many would crush the few: the country would soon be in disorder.
P3What belongs to nature cannot be learned or worked for: it is a gift of Heaven. Rites and justice, on the contrary, were produced by the sages, and people learn them and acquire them through effort.
P4The good is what is upright, orderly and peaceful; the bad is what is partial, dangerous, rebellious and disorderly.
P5 · implicit premiseIf the inborn inclinations lead of themselves to disorder, and if goodness is learned and so does not come from nature, then nature is bad and goodness is acquired.
Therefore human nature is bad; goodness is acquired, through teachers, rites and laws, as crooked wood is straightened by the carpenter's square.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where inborn inclinations lead to disorder and goodness is learned, but where nature also carries inclinations to good, which simply need cultivating: the conclusion "nature is bad" no longer follows.
With its five premises, the conclusion follows. The most fragile point is the definition of nature in P3: "what cannot be learned". It excludes in advance any acquired goodness. Mencius would agree that goodness develops through study, but would hold that the sprout which makes study possible is in nature. P4 is worth noting too: Xunzi calls "bad" what leads to disorder, a sense more social than moral, which a modern reader might call "dangerous" or "antisocial".
Analogy. A vine left to itself gives tiny, sour grapes; it takes pruning, tying and grafting to get good grapes. Xunzi would say: the vine-grower's work is not in the nature of the vine, it straightens it. Mencius would say: the vine still has in it the possibility of grapes.

Objections

6

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Mencius (as Xunzi quotes him) 320 BC · attacks premise 3

Summary: Xunzi quotes Mencius, for whom the fact that people are able to learn shows that their nature is good.

Xunzi replies
see the argument
Xunzi Xunzi's reply (chapter 23, beginning)
Summary: Xunzi answers that Mencius has not grasped the difference between nature and what is acquired. What belongs to nature is a gift of Heaven, which can be neither learned nor worked for. What is learned and worked for is artifice. As keen sight is not separable from the eye, nature is not learned: if goodness is learned, it is therefore not nature.
The debate goes on (our summary) Everything depends on the word "nature". For Xunzi it is what comes without learning. For Mencius it is what is most proper to humans and leads them to become what they should be (6A.7). They do not contradict the same facts: each gives the word a different sense, and the disagreement partly comes from that choice.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Both camps agree on a fact: anyone can learn to be good. They differ on what this reveals: a sprout already there (Mencius), or a capacity to correct oneself without an original bent towards the good (Xunzi). Basic disagreement: what do we mean by "nature"?
Mencius 320 BC · attacks premise 1

Summary: Mencius says that people are thought to be bad as Ox Mountain is thought to have no trees: we see only what remains after the cutting, and forget that nature gave shoots. Goodness is not absent, it is damaged day after day.

Xunzi replies
see the argument
Xunzi Xunzi's reply (chapter 23)
Summary: Xunzi quotes Mencius' thesis that nature is good and that all people have lost it, and judges it a serious mistake. Barely born, a person already strays from his first simplicity. A goodness that everyone necessarily loses is not that of a good nature.
The debate goes on (our summary) The difference lies in what counts as "lost": Mencius speaks of damage suffered afterwards (the axe, the animals), Xunzi of damage that begins at birth, by the sole fact of desires. Each can return to the other the charge of not showing what really precedes the damage.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Neither has a decisive observation of man's "first state": that is what makes it hard to decide between the damaged mountain and the crooked wood.
Mencius 320 BC · attacks premise 1

Summary: if people suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, all feel alarm and distress, without calculation: not to win the favour of the parents, nor praise from neighbours, nor to avoid a bad reputation. This immediate reaction is proof of a good core, which Xunzi does not list among the inborn inclinations.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in -320, after the author's death (-235).
The debate goes on (our summary) Mencius writes before Xunzi, who does not answer the example of the child at the well. His criterion of nature (what comes out without learning) could however count it, which is the difficulty for him. A defender of Xunzi could say this compassion is weak and does not hold against other desires without upbringing. Hobbes would see in it a pity that returns to oneself (see the argument on Mencius, Hobbes's objection).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open disagreement: does spontaneous compassion belong to nature, on a par with the desire for gain? Each reads it according to his thesis, and no experiment in the texts decides between the two readings.
Z
Zhu Xi 1190 · attacks the conclusion

Summary: Zhu Xi says that Mencius speaks of nature only as it is at the origin, while Xunzi saw only the bad side, and others saw a mixture. According to him, nature (the principle, good) and the breath (qi) that carries it and makes people unequal must be held together.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1190, after the author's death (-235).
The debate goes on (our summary) For Zhu Xi, Xunzi is not wrong to see the inclinations that lead to evil: he is wrong to take them for the whole of nature. Xunzi would have answered, going by his text, that only what is innate and not learned deserves the name of nature, which excludes Zhu Xi's good "principle" insofar as it has to be cultivated.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Zhu Xi and Xunzi describe the same person, with inclinations to good and to evil. They differ on what is called "nature": the principle in man (Zhu Xi), or what he brings at birth before effort (Xunzi).
A
A tension within Xunzi's own text attacks premise 5

Xunzi writes that every person in the street has the quality that lets him know benevolence and righteousness, and the instrument that lets him practise them: this is why he can become a sage. But where do this quality and this instrument come from if nature is entirely bad? They seem to belong to nature, and they are not bad.

Xunzi replies
Xunzi What Xunzi says next (chapter 23, end)
Summary: Xunzi distinguishes "being able" from "doing". The man in the street can become a sage, but that does not mean he will: he may not do it, without this preventing his being capable of it. He compares this to feet that could cross the whole earth although no one has ever done so.
The debate goes on (our summary) This answer shows that Xunzi separates being capable of good (innate) from being drawn to the good (acquired). His opponents will say that the capacity to correct oneself is already a leaning towards the good. A defender of Xunzi can answer that this capacity serves evil as well: intelligence serves calculation as it serves virtue.
Where the debate stands (our summary)A matter of scholars' interpretation: does Xunzi's "nature" include capacities (which are neutral) or only desires? The text itself gives both senses, and the discussion goes on.
J
J. Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom 2007 · attacks premise 1

Summary: in a series of experiments, six- and ten-month-old babies watching scenes with figures preferred the one that helped another character over the one that hindered it. The authors see in this an elementary moral evaluation, present before any upbringing or language.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 2007, after the author's death (-235).
The debate goes on (our summary) This experiment shows a preference for helping, not a tendency to help or to share, which Xunzi would deny. Work by the same team (Hamlin, Mahajan, Liberman and Wynn, Psychological Science, 2013) has also shown that nine- and fourteen-month-old babies prefer those who harm others who are unlike them. Both camps can therefore interpret it: the beginning of a moral sense (Mencius), or a sorting by similarity, which education must then widen (Xunzi).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: the result itself is debated. A large replication run in 37 labs (ManyBabies 4, Developmental Science, 2024) did not find the preference for the helper; other researchers answer that it used videos and a single scene. Neither camp can claim these studies without reservation.